Just Like Home(40)

Maybe this—the secret she’s sharing with Daphne—will bind them closer, give them something to wink at each other about behind her father’s back. Maybe it will turn into love. But then again, this secret is also something that made her mother hurt her on purpose. It’s something that made the room feel thick with fear and heavy with urgency. And once the secret had solidified, Daphne was gone.

Vera imagined the friend she could have, the kind of friend who would find her here in the bathroom fighting back confused tears and ask what’s the matter in a voice like the tap of fingernails against the side of the tub.

“Nothing,” Vera mutters. “Nothing’s the matter. I just wish I knew…” There’s no end to that sentence, none that satisfies, and trying to find it makes her eyes well up with more unwelcome tears.

It was really cool how you didn’t even cry when you fell off your bike, her friend would say. And Brandon was wrong to push you.

Vera’s fingers curl around the lip of the tub, leaving a little smear of blood behind. Her smile is wobbly, but real. Brandon was wrong to push her. “Yeah,” she whispers. “Yeah. It doesn’t matter. Whatever.”

Whatever, her friend echoes, and it sounds just a little less cool than when Vera says it. Just a little more hesitant.

Vera stands slowly and washes her hands in the sink. Gummy blood is caked between her fingers from where she tried to keep from dripping on the sidewalk and on the floor. She watches the bloody water swirl down the drain, so fast it’s as if the sink is drinking it up.

“Dad wouldn’t cheat on Mom,” she mutters to the sink.

He wouldn’t, her friend answers easily. Vera is trembling with an emotion she can’t name, but the thought of a friend so nonchalantly dismissing Brandon’s accusation makes her stand up a little straighter. Something that easy to reject can’t carry any weight.

“He wouldn’t,” she says again, and it comes out stronger this time. “It’s a lie. He’s lying.” The part she can’t say aloud, even to the walls of the empty bathroom, is how badly she needs it to be a lie—because she knows, in her bones, that her father loves her. He would never betray their family. And if that’s not true, then nothing can be true ever again.

Brandon and his mom must not know very much about sugaring, that’s all. And they certainly don’t seem to be so suspicious of Francis Crowder when they get a bottle of maple syrup from him every February. It probably just takes a really long time to make the dozen or so bottles he gives away every year. He must need to collect all spring and all summer.

He’s lying, her friend repeats, and she takes it as confirmation: Brandon doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

She prods the swollen part of her lip with her tongue, tasting the way the raw flesh is different from the rest of her mouth. It tastes like the hole left behind by a fallen-out tooth—not quite bloody, not unpleasant. Just strange.

She is not sure whether she likes that taste. Maybe not. Maybe it’s just new.

Maybe you’ll get a cool scar, her friend whispers.

She tongues the split in her lip again. “Maybe you’ll get a cool scar,” she echoes under her breath, liking the sound of it. She laughs softly. The laugh seems to double as it echoes off the tile and glass of the bathroom, and the pain of the day fades a little, because Vera feels the way she always feels when she’s at home.

She feels like she isn’t alone after all.





CHAPTER FOURTEEN


A week after her return to the Crowder House, Vera stood in the wide arch that divided the entryway from the dining room where her mother slept. She didn’t move, and she didn’t breathe, because she was listening. Listening for anything. The creak of James shifting his weight in one of those uncomfortable dining chairs, the hiss of fabric shifting against itself. A cough. A breath.

Anything.

The dining room was much too still.

Vera’s hand remained on the lightswitch where it had landed after just a few frantic gropes. When she’d turned the light on, her first thought had been that her mother would surely need another blanket to ward off the strange chill that seemed to inhabit the dining room. Now she wasn’t so sure, because dead people didn’t tend to need blankets, and as far as Vera could tell her mother wasn’t breathing.

“Daphne?” Vera didn’t say it too loudly, didn’t want to risk startling her mother, just in case. Didn’t want to kick off another of those awful coughing fits. But the sound of Vera’s voice had no effect.

Daphne didn’t stir.

Vera set the banker’s box that was tucked under her arm down on the floor. She took a few steps closer to the bed, peering hard at her mother’s concave chest, looking for any sign of a breath.

Daphne’s chin was tucked down into her neck, her face hidden in the shadows of her hair, which had come loose somehow since the last time Vera had checked in on her. She wasn’t moving. Not at all.

Vera cleared her throat and tried again. “Daphne? Are you awake?”

A low rattle came from the shape in the bed. The sound pecked at something buried deep in the recesses of Vera’s mind—some summertime memory of sweat and oil and grass stains on a stinging knee—but before she could exhume the precise shape of that memory, Daphne spoke.

“I am now.” Her voice was clotted and slow.